The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is blocking the main whistleblower in the Fast and Furious case from publishing a book for pay, claiming his retelling of the Mexico “gun-walking” scandal will hurt morale inside the embattled law enforcement agency, according to documents obtained by The Washington Times.

The way the ATF is trying to do this is by claiming it’s employment outside the agency, and simply rejecting it.

Documents show that one of Mr. Dodson’s supervisors in Arizona, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Carlos Canino, rejected his request July 19 and was backed in the decision by the agent in charge of the office, Thomas G. Atteberry, four days later.

Supervisors ultimately don’t make those decisions in the fedgov. Requests for outside employment will go up at least to the level of an “agent in charge” of an office, station, or area of operations.

Their rejection made no claims that the book would release sensitive or classified information or compromise ongoing law enforcement proceedings.

Rather, the supervisors offered a different reason for their decision. “This would have a negative impact on morale in the Phoenix [Field Division] and would have a detrimental effect on our relationships with DEA and FBI.”

Given that Canino also testified in front of congress, I’m not sure what his personal opinion on the book would be, but he’s probably also being pressured from above.

The ATF general counsel’s office subsequently sanctioned the decision, all but killing the book project.

“Therefore, your request to engage in outside employment is denied,” he said.

Again, to write a book, which will net a paycheck when published, is something that can be denied. The idea behind this (for other agencies) is that it limits corruption and allows for a CYA by employees as they can show that other income isn’t from being crooked, and it allows managers to determine if an outside job will take too much time and interest away from the employee’s duties.

This, however, is just saying “don’t tell the truth because it’ll hurt our feelings” at best, but more “don’t tell the truth because the ATF is a destructive, corrupt, tyrannical agency”.

And here the story begins to get the basics of Fast and Furious wrong:

In all, ATF officials permitted more than 1,700 semi-automatic weapons to flow through the hands of straw buyers for the Mexican cartels, with many crossing the border.

Senior ATF officials hoped to trace the guns to crimes, then make a bigger case against the Mexican drug lords. The strategy, however, backfired when hundreds of the weapons began showing up at crime scenes on both sides of the border, including at the December 2010 murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.

The strategy didn’t backfire. In testimony to congress, the operation was described to send guns south so they would be found at crime scenes. That was the whole plan.

The Mexican authorities didn’t know, and Darren Gil, ATF attache in Mexico, didn’t know. No one in Mexico, whether US or Mexican authorities, knew about the plan to send guns south. There was no way to interdict the guns, and there was no way to make a case against the cartels. This is one of the things that left the investigators on Oversight and Reform shocked (even a Democrat or two, before their party line programming kicks in).

The story goes on with a couple more huge lies from the ATF.

The ATF, under new director B. Todd Jones, says it has imposed sweeping procedures to ensure gun-walking doesn’t occur in future cases.

The book dispute with Mr. Dodson, however, is not the first First Amendment controversy to erupt in the aftermath of the scandal.

Last year, Mr. Jones raised alarm in Congress and inside his own agency when he released a videotaped message that warned agencies that there would be “consequences” if agents blew the whistle on wrongdoing outside their chain of command.

The message led to claims that whistleblowing would be chilled, and ATF subsequently clarified Mr. Jones‘ remarks to emphasize that the agency would not interfere with legitimate whistleblowing activities.

Note the key word there “legitimate”. They’ll decide what’s “legitimate” and what’s not. And what’s “legitimate” and what’s not is defined as what helps the Obama administration versus hurts it.

A federal judge has rejected Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to keep the courts from wading into the “Fast and Furious” documents dispute that led to him being held in contempt by the House last year.

In a ruling Monday night, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson turned down the Justice Department’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege to prevent some records about the administration’s response to the “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal from being turned over to Congress.

… “Dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies,” she wrote.

That’s a slight improvement over just throwing it out and saying “phony scandal” and “nobody gives a shit“.

House Republicans suing Attorney General Eric Holder for documents in their probe of the botched Operation Fast and Furious will have to put up with a delay in their case.

After the U.S. Justice Department yesterday asked to suspend the litigation, saying it lacked adequate staff for civil cases because of the partial government shutdown, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee argued the request should be denied. Government lawyers were continuing to work when a court ordered them to do so, they said.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson today in Washington put the case on hold.

“While the vast majority of litigants who now must endure a delay in the progress of their matters do so due to circumstances beyond their control, that cannot be said of the House of Representatives, which has played a role in the shutdown that prompted the stay motion,” she said.

“There are no exigent circumstances in this case that would justify an order of the court forcing furloughed attorneys to return to their desks,” Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, said in her order.

200 dead Mexicans and two dead US citizens apparently aren’t that important. Of course, they haven’t been to the Obama administration since Obama and Holder’s DOJ decided to go kill some Mexicans as a pretext to crack down on US civil rights.

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It is kind of astonishing to realize that he sent guns to Mexico, murdered hundreds, and the media wholly and completely covered for him, he was reelected to a second term, he talks to Iran but refuses to negotiate with congress, and is now locking Vietnam vets away from the Wall and WW2 vets away from the memorial.

And he gets a good laugh out of it, because the media will still blame Republicans and fools will believe it.

Three more weapons from Fast and Furious have turned up at crime scenes in Mexico, CBS News has learned, as the toll from the controversial federal operation grows.

According to Justice Department tracing documents obtained by CBS News, all three guns are WASR-10 762-caliber Romanian rifles. Two were purchased by Fast and Furious suspect Uriel Patino in May and July of 2010. Sean Steward, who was convicted on gun charges in July 2012, purchased a third. The rifles were traced yesterday to the Lone Wolf gun shop in Glendale, Ariz.

During Fast and Furious and similar operations, federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) encouraged the Lone Wolf and other gun stores to sell massive amounts of weapons to questionable purchasers who allegedly trafficked them Mexican drug cartels.

Patino is said to have purchased 700 guns while under ATF’s watch. Ever since, a steady stream of the guns have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. But the Justice Department has refused repeated requests from Congress and CBS News to provide a full accounting. An estimated 1,400 guns are still on the street or unaccounted for.

This will be going on for years. The body count from weapons sent to the cartels by Obama and Eric Holder’s DOJ and ATF will continue to go up.

“This suspicious activity has been going on for quite some time – both on my CBS computer and my personal computer,” Attkisson said. “CBS then hired its own independent cyber security firm, which has been conducting a thorough forensic exam … they were able to rule out malware, phishing programs, that sort of thing.”

Attkisson described some of the bizarre things that were happening with her computer.

“There were just signs of unusual happenings for many months, odd behavior like the computers just turning themselves on at night and then turning themselves back off again. I was basically able to verify and obtain information from my sources on the suspicious activity and I reported it to CBS News in January because of course it included CBS equipment and systems.”

HotAir notes that she was on Bill “Breathes Heavy At Deborah Norville” O’Reilly the other night and stated she’s pretty sure she knows who did it.

The likely suspect, which when she confirms will be 100%, as the rest of her reporting always is, is probably going to be the US govt. What branch of the US govt or how is probably the big question – whether it’s Eric Holder’s DOJ or Hillary’s State Department or maybe even the Department of Energy or another agency she offended by reporting the facts.

Regardless, they chose a very poor target for snooping on.

And if those targeting her escalate things, it’s worth noting that her reporting has earned her the respect of some communities of rough men (and women) that provide physical security, and would be willing to do so.

Her reporting on Benghazi got her friends from Little Creek to Coronado, and her reporting on Fast and Furious got her friends from Brownsville to San Diego and Washington state to Maine… state.

The most confounding thing in writing about the NSA/PRISM/Snowden clusterfark is that, if you don’t work in national security, there’s no yardstick to measure which claims are plausible and which are insane. That in itself is a brutal indictment of the surveillance state, of course: The government’s powers are so vast and so secret that even a citizen who follows the news really can’t debate them intelligently. Is it insane to think that a 29-year-old NSA/Booz IT guy could be reading Barack Obama’s private e-mails if he wanted to?

He says he was granted broad “wiretapping” authorities. In a video interview with The Guardian, Snowden claims to have had incredibly broad authority to wiretap Americans, saying “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal e-mail.”

These records exist. The NSA has been saving emails and has been saving metadata and actual data for quite a while now.

So how about a FOIA request on ATF Gunwalker/Fast and Furious conspirators like Bill Newell, Lanny Breuer, Kevin O’Reilly, and even AG Eric “Held In Contempt” Holder? Or how about congressrequesting the documents from the NSA?

The NSA can’t claim there’s an “ongoing investigation”, since they aren’t the DOJ.

This is not a question of American citizens’ rights, this is a question of the US government purposely arming narcoterrorists in order to have this talking point, claiming the 90% lie over and over.

I can’t think of many things more insulting or downright foul to hear from our President other than his own crimes being blamed on our rights – as was intended. He is now going international with the demand that our rights go away because he committed crimes… to deny us those rights.

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This is like a rapist saying “not only did she deserve it when I did it to her, but that proves my point, we have to keep the world safe from women like her who cause rape”.